It’s
surely not unreasonable to conclude from events earlier this month that
the United Nations has virtually declared war on the Vatican. It issued
a report on Catholic clergy abuse that was so sweeping and accusing, so
lacking in fact and nuance, so extreme and damning, that it resembled
pamphlet propaganda rather than informed reporting. The report not only
accuses the Church of covering up, in the U.N.’s own words, “the
molestation and rape of thousands of children” but also demanded that
the Church change its teaching on abortion, contraception and
homosexuality. In other words, the same U.N. that has called for the age
of consent to be lowered to fourteen and thinks Iran and Saudi Arabia
are worthy to be arbiters of human rights issues, hates Catholicism and
wants the world to know it.

The U.N. Human Rights council
currently includes, amongst others, Pakistan, Russia, Venezuela, China,
Algeria and the United Arab Emirates. Frankly, the whole thing is
laughable. But tragic, too. Pakistan has a blasphemy law under which
hundreds of people are arrested and incarcerated for expressing comments
considered negative about Islam. China operates gulags and executes
political dissidents. The list goes on, on, and grotesquely on.

If
we delve a little deeper the situation becomes positively whacky. On
the U.N. Committee on the Right of the Child, led by the same Kristen
Sandberg who announced the anti-Catholic report to the media with such
evident relish, we have Syria, Saudi Arabia, Uganda, Egypt and Thailand.
In Syria, children are tortured and murdered by the government’s
security service; Thailand has the largest child prostitution trade in
the world; Saudi Arabia allows if not encourages child brides and female
circumcision; and in Uganda homosexuals are beaten, arrested and even
murdered.

Those are the nations condemning the Vatican.

Frankly,
the report reads more like the ranting and raving of a bunch of
first-year students in the campus Atheist Society than a piece of
research into a deeply serious issue. Nothing, it claims, has been done
at all by the Vatican to address the abuse issue. Goodness, even the far
from Catholic-friendly BBC reporters in Rome who have covered this
issue have said that such an accusation is patently absurd. It is, and
is also irresponsible, sectarian, hateful and awash with hyperbole.

I
have written about the abuse issue many timesI even included a full
chapter about it in one of my booksand I wish I would never have to
mention it again. But I will, and thus have to speak truth to liberal
and secular power, even if it is jarring.

When we discuss the
abuse crisis it is extraordinarily difficult to sound fair and
sympathetic. Because if we are the former, we seem to lack in the
latter; if the latter, we often neglect the former. To describe what
happened is sometimes assumed to be a defense or even some sort of vile
justification. It isn’t, of course, but because there are so many people
in the media in particular who wish to beat the Church with the stick
of sexual abuse it is often extremely difficult even to be heard at all.
Denial is immoral but obfuscation just as bad.

The hard, harsh
facts are that perhaps as many as 3% of Catholic clergy were directly or
indirectly involved in this horror, the typical victim was a teenage
boy, and most of this occurred decades ago. The nature of the victims is
significant because the U.N. report constantly speaks of children; in a
way, of course, they were, but more than 80% were teenage boys, young
men of 14 and 15.

This is evil, horrible, and wrongbut it’s not actually pedophilia, and it tells us much about the perpetrators as well.

For
the most part, the reaction of bishops and bureaucracy was to order the
abuser to change parishes, demand that he undertake counseling, and
never repeat the crime. Today we cringe when we hear of such a banal,
pathetic response. But this was standard secular, psychiatric
advice at the time, and it was the same advice given to school boards,
sports organizations, and other religious bodies.

We now know
better, but while those other groups are not taken to task for not doing
enough, the Church is attacked for its callousness. Good Lord, the
double standard and the tendentious history are almost overwhelming! Of
course there were men in authority who chose to do nothing out of their
own sexual deviance or downright fear and cowardice, but they were a
tiny number. It was panic rather than perversion that characterized the
worst of the response by bishops, and that is something for which we
should all be deeply ashamed.

Yet there is surely no other group
of men and women on earth that have done so much since all of this to
put matters right, to show contrition, and to make the Church arguably
the safest place for a young person to be. Tragically, this is not the
case for all institutions. In the United States, for example, the
influence of teachers’ unions has meant that some abusers have not been
dismissed and are still teaching in public schools.

Abuse is a
reflection of the broken status of the human person. We are fallen,
damaged, and in need of repair. It says nothing about the Catholic
Church, other than this is why we need the Church: to guide us back to
the ways of God. If it were a result of celibacy, there would be no
abuse in non-Catholic churches or sports teams; if it was due to an
all-made clergy, there would be no abuse in families  where, obscenely,
it is actually at its highest. Those alleged explanations are just
excuses used by unscrupulous critics with an agenda to attack
Catholicism. They often seem more concerned with using the abuse issue
to attack the Church than with caring for the victims of the actual
abuse.

I remember meeting a man in his late-20s who had been
sexually molested by a priest. The priest later took his own life. I
expected to meet an angry, Catholic-hating person, but instead had the
privilege of spending time with a devout, peaceful Catholic. “I was
abused by a man, not by the Church. He used the Church to further his
lust, and I see the Catholic Church as being as much a victim in all
this as I am”, he said, making me feel extremely inadequate. The Church
dealt with this issue some time ago, we know that Pope Benedict
defrocked 400 clergy in a single year, and we are also aware that there
are exploiting lawyers and radical groups wanting and seeking to smash
the Church.

Men who are sexually ambivalent or confused are now
generally prevented from entering seminaries and for this the Church has
been accused of sexual discrimination. It just can’t win, which is
precisely how the sexual revolutionaries and political extremists at the
United Nations want it. They are exploiting a monumental tragedy to try
to force the Catholic Church to abandon its theological position, give
up the fight against ethical decay, embrace moral relativism, and sign
on to the anti-family manifesto of some of our new masters.

It’s not going to happen. Unhappy, oppressive lords in New York and Brussels: there will be no surrender.

About the Author

Michael Coren

Michael Coren is the host of The Arena, a nightly television show broadcast on the Canadian network Sun News, and a columnist whose work appears in numerous publications across Canada. He is the author of 16 books, the most recent of which is Hatred: Islam’s War on Christianity (Signal Books/Random House). His website is www.michaelcoren.com, where his books can be purchased and he can be booked for speeches.

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